NAPOLEON THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE by Michael Broers

Author:Michael Broers [Broers, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571301539
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

INTO IBERIA: THE ORIGINS OF AN ULCER

Talleyrand now languished in semi-disgrace, but few of those Napoleon had worked with during the years of struggle and danger were ever really driven from the fold. Napoleon made him Grand Elector less than a week after he accepted his resignation over the Russian alliance on 9 August 1807, and he still held the honorific post of Grand Chamberlain. He continued to seek Talleyrand’s advice, and invited him to establish himself at Fontainebleau, as part of the new beginning. Eager to reintegrate himself with Napoleon, he did so, and he brought with him a plan, ‘Spain’, which he discussed at length with Napoleon in the course of the autumn. Neither man knew what he was talking about.

Nevertheless, the need to make the Spanish alliance, which had been in effect since the early Consulate, into something capable of enforcing the Blockade was paramount for Napoleon; it was also the gateway to Portugal, England’s oldest ally and now an effective entrepôt for the entry of British goods into the continent. Talleyrand had less prosaic ideas, and Napoleon was in just the frame of mind to absorb them. Spain was truly terra incognita to Napoleon, but the needs of the Blockade now forced him to look that way. Bourrienne, who knew Napoleon’s ways well, remarked in his memoirs, ‘I may mention … one remarkable fact from my own knowledge, which is that Bonaparte, who by turns cast his eyes over all the States of Europe, never fixed his attention on Spain.’30 When dealing with Italy, Napoleon could draw on his personal background, the research he had done for the army in the 1790s, and his own campaigning there; he began his exploration of Germany at Rastatt in 1798, when meeting its ambassadors, and had trodden it well in the recent wars. He had come to know Poland and even Lithuania at first hand, but he had no grasp of Spain. Nor had he ever taken care, until now, to try to find out about the country or even its high politics. Indeed, the Spanish Court had long been regarded as somewhere to send troublesome men in semi-disgrace, who told Napoleon whatever he wanted to hear to regain his favour, epitomised by Lucien. His ambassador until March 1808 conformed to this pattern: François de Beauharnais was Josephine’s ex-brother-in-law, an aristocrat with a taste for intrigue, but none of his sister’s sense of decorum or tact, who involved himself far too much in the quarrels between Carlos IV and his son, the Prince of Asturias – the future Ferdinand VII – which dominated high politics. Beauharnais openly sided with Ferdinand in the spring of 1808, hardly the conduct of a skilled diplomat. This was what Napoleon had to draw on for information, and Talleyrand never made any attempt over the previous years, to appoint better men.31

Talleyrand proved as ignorant as his master, if in a different way, and it soon showed in their conversations, that his mind could not stretch beyond high politics.

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